PEN American Center has said its piece on the Sony Pictures/Interview debacle, which ought after all be of interest to writers (screenwriters or otherwise) everywhere who struggle against censorship. The statement took the form of an open letter “from PEN to Michael Lynton, Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman and CEO re: The Interview.”

The open letter states that: “PEN is appalled at the intrusive, criminal and profoundly menacing reprisals and threats that Sony Pictures has endured as a result of producing and planning to distribute The Interview. PEN has long stood with writers and creators who have suffered assaults aimed to suppress the dissemination of their ideas. We believe firmly that violence is never justified as a reaction to speech, no matter how offensive that speech may be to some.”

PEN offers the benefits of its experience in dealing with the situation. “We extend our solidarity to Sony Entertainment, and offer our support in whatever form is useful to you and to all those involved in The Interview. The attack on Sony Pictures is an assault on the wider creative community; one that must be met with unity and resolve.” This includes actual arrangements to show the film. “PEN would be very pleased to arrange to screen The Interview publicly in New York or Washington, DC with appropriate security precautions. This is a genuine offer and one that we hope you will take seriously.”

PEN also takes its stand on the widely contested rumors that North Korea was behind the threats against Sony. “That the intervention of a foreign government that makes a mockery of intellectual freedom should determine what the American public can see and what American artists can produce is shocking; it puts us all under the sway of armed fundamentalism and intolerance.”

All this said, PEN does not explicitly criticize Sony Pictures for declining to screen The Interview, as many others have done, although it does urge what it takes to be the right course. “It is in solidarity and in an appeal to our shared appreciation of the importance of creative expression that we urge you to take swift action to fulfill your pledge to find a way to distribute The Interview. This work should be made widely available, proving that threats and intimidation will not win the day … If the decision to pull The Interview from all platforms stands, it will represent a lasting blow for free expression, emboldening would-be censors the world over.”

The decision by Sony Pictures to release The Interview at a selected number of cinemas in the U.S. on Christmas Day at least goes partway towards meeting PEN’s recommendations, although it still falls well short of a full theatrical release. For the time being, then, the whole incident appears to be at least a partial victory for the forces of repression.

]]>http://www.teleread.com/sony/us-pen-open-letter-supports-sony-doesnt-rebuke-interview-takedown/feed/0The Sony DPT-S1 comes to America — for more than a thousand dollarshttp://www.teleread.com/sony/sony-dpt-s1-comes-america-thousands-dollars/
http://www.teleread.com/sony/sony-dpt-s1-comes-america-thousands-dollars/#commentsTue, 13 May 2014 14:25:12 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=112773

With the e-readers and tablets and mobile devices galore, who would ever think that a PDF reader would out price them all?

If you are ready to spend more than $1,000, you can buy one on Amazon for $1,300. EBay also has completed prices ranging between $1,400 and $1,600. The only current reseller in the U.S. is Worldox and is not available to the average consumer.

Here’s the thing, these items have sold. Completed listings on eBay show 13 of these readers (mostly the Japanese version) selling for more than $1,400 each.

So what makes this reader so intriguing? When dealing with cloud-based storage, consumers can access thousands of documents. It could be a tool for lawyers, researchers or government officials. Consider the thousands of pieces of paper that are created – and perhaps even now eliminated – by those professionals that need access to mountains of data.

It also allows users to create sticky notes and annotate documents.

The price isn’t pretty, but clearly there are people out there who have found a need for this product. But what makes this so different from a Microsoft Surface or another tablet with PDF-reading capabilities? Is it the 13.3-inch screen? The light weight? The large amount of internal and external storage? All of it?

Here’s a story Nate covered over on The Digital Reader, that could be important in months to come. Adobe is changing up its DRM format, and as of July, will stop supporting the old format altogether. Any new EPUB e-books sold with Adobe DRM on them will be incompatible with older readers unless they have been upgraded.

This really is a pretty big deal. Pretty much every e-reader sold besides Kindle and Nook used Adobe ADEPT e-book DRM. (And I seem to recall even Nook could support ADEPT DRM even though B&N used a slightly different DRM format for its own titles.) Sony, Kobo, pretty much any other e-book store that’s not Amazon or B&N relies on Adobe’s system because they couldn’t afford to buy some other e-book company (Mobipocket in Amazon’s case; eReader/Fictionwise in B&N’s) to roll their own.

The problem is, ADEPT has been cracked for literally years. (The main crack was named, amusingly enough, “Inept.”) As far as preventing works from being copied is concerned, the emperor has no clothes. (But then, neither do Amazon or B&N’s DRM. Apprentice Alf makes it easy to add new e-books to your Calibre library no matter where they’re from or if they have DRM.) Hence, Adobe is “hardening” its DRM.

Not that I expect this will prevent it from being cracked again. Given that the very nature of DRM means that the consumer, or at least his device or app, must be provided with the means of breaking it, it’s only a matter of time before this new version will have a crack available just like the old one.

But meanwhile, any e-reader that uses the old version will have to have a firmware update to work with any e-books bought under the new version. And while some companies that are still around, like Sony and possibly Astak (they’re still around, but as a security camera company rather than an e-reader company), can afford to do that, you have to wonder whether they’ll bother to update discontinued products regardless. Of course, whether the e-reader supports DRM or not, it will still work with e-books whose DRM has been removed.

I’d say something about how happy I am that Adobe is going to show more people just how bad DRM is…except, are they really? Remember, e-book readers didn’t take off until Amazon came out with its Kindle. And to this day, the Kindle still makes up the bulk of e-readers, and Barnes & Noble and Kobo (who can afford to update their readers) have most of the rest.

And even then, it only matters for e-books sold from those stores that use it—which again are not Amazon, B&N, or Apple, where the vast majority of e-books are sold these days. I gather even Kobo doesn’t use it internally to its reader. (To be fair, it might be more often used these days for e-books checked out from libraries, but I suspect most people who do that have modern readers.) The number of people who are actually inconvenienced by this move might just end up being statistical noise.

Today marks an important anniversary for our digital media era—an era that couldn’t have been foreseen thirty years ago, but nonetheless relies to a very great extent on a legal decision exactly thirty years old. Today is the 30th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision that declared the Sony Betamax VCR was legal because “time shifting,” recording a program off the air to watch it later, was fair use, and thus the VCR had substantial non-infringing purposes. Ars Technica has a feature article looking at the context of the decision in greater detail.

This decision is crucial to our digital world because copying is so much of what digital does. Even though the copies made back then were analog, the principle is still the same in digital—a copy is a copy. Thus, when an appeals court ruled that MP3 players were legal because “space shifting” was fair use, it was relying on the Betamax decision. Though the decision was about Diamond Multimedia’s Rio MP3 player, it nonetheless paved the way for the iPad to come along a few years later—which led to the iPhone and Android, which led to the iPad and Nexus, and our entire mobile digital world.

It’s a decision that came up in the Cablevision case regarding the legality of cloud-based DVRs to record shows for consumers at the cable company rather than in the home. And it will likewise be important in the case of Aereo, which records TV broadcasts from individual micro-antennas so they can be streamed over the Internet.

Michael Robertson tried to argue that this was what his ill-fated MP3.com service for streaming music over the Internet if you could prove you owned the CD did, without much success, and his later MP3Tunes music locker service attracted similar attention—even though Apple, Amazon, and Google all have their own such services now—and in much the same way as Robertson’s original MP3.com service, they don’t even require you to upload the MP3s for songs they already have on file themselves.

In practically any case that involves making copies of media for personal use, you can bet this one comes up somewhere. So, anyway, Sony, thanks for sticking up for our right to copy, and giving us thirty great years of time and space shifting.

The BBC’s Magazine section has a story on a 13-year-old kid’s experience over the course of a week using one of the original Walkman tape players, which came out 30 years ago this week. As you might expect, it’s replete with “How does this work? This looks funny. I can’t believe people actually used to think this thing was awesome!” from the younger generation. (It’s easy to wonder how he couldn’t understand a Walkman, but you have to remember he’s just 13. It would be like asking someone from my generation to figure out a reel-to-reel player in 1986.)

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

He dinged the Walkman for its bulk, weight, battery life, and capacity, but enjoyed the way it had two earphone jacks instead of one (only the first Walkmans did) and the socket for plugging directly into AC power.

Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?

"I remembered it fondly as a way to enjoy what music I liked, where I liked," he said. "But when I see it now, I wonder how I carried it!"

The Walkman really was the iPod of its day, in more ways than one. Not only was it the way people listened to music portably back then, but it was the huge gotta-have-it device. Expensive, too—at over $200 in 1983 ($470 in 2013 dollars), it was tantamount to the iPod in price as well. I didn’t get mine until a few years later when they were running at $50 to $60 thanks to competition from other, cheaper brands. (In fact, my first one was a General Electric.)

Funny thing, though: you haven’t seen competition bring prices down as much for iPods as you did Walkmans back in the day. Probably that’s because they’re not as substitutable as Walkmans. Any player could play any cassette, but now you’ve got vendor lock-in with iTunes and other music apps. A switch from one device to another could mean going through a lot of rigamarole.

Over the course of packing for my move to Greenwood, IN, I rediscovered my own Sony Walkman, one of the generation a few years later that was smaller and lighter with more features, as well as the Case Logic case I used to cart it and four tapes of my choice around in. I remember way back when, I was so into having my tunes available that I would take not only that case, but two 30-tape portable cassette cases with me everywhere I went. As nostalgic as I am for the bad old days, I still don’t feel any urge to ditch my 32 GB Android smartphone for it. Mobile technology marches on.

Who’s one of the biggest beneficiaries of Android? According to Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund, it could be Microsoft. In a new note on Microsoft, Sherlund estimates that Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year from Android patent royalties—almost pure profit. It is using that profit to conceal the losses from its Windows Phone and Xbox groups by grouping them together into one division and then reporting that division’s profit and loss as a single unit.

That group always seemed to be profitable, but Sherlund says it’s largely because of the Android money.

Sherlund says that if you back out the Android profits, Microsoft is probably losing $2.5 billion on Skype, Xbox, and Windows Phone. Of that, $2 billion in losses are attributable to the Xbox platform.

And it could soon be even more. Microsoft is part of a consortium of companies who bought a huge patent portfolio from Canadian telco Nortel for $4.5 billion, and just filed a series of patent lawsuits against Google and seven Android device manufacturers. The group also includes Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony. Given how successful Android has been in the last few years, it’s not terribly surprising its competitors would want to gang up on it.

But then, that’s the way the patenting world works. 14 years can be an eternity in Internet time. Given how much e-reading is done on Android devices (even many e-ink readers are powered by versions of Android), this will be worth watching over the long term.

Another brief Baen update: Baen e-books have started appearing on the Sony e-book store. It’s hard to tell how many, because it’s apparently not possible to search by publisher, but a number of Baen David Weber, David Drake, and other titles have started to show up. Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf said on the Baen Bar that a press release had been approved and was supposed to go out today, though I don’t find any sign of it on Google News yet.

The biggest surprise for me in all this is really that Sony is still selling e-books at all. Sony’s “make.believe” slogan seems especially relevant, since for all the impact they have on the marketplace, e-book stores are that aren’t Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo might as well be make-believe. It seems like an odd choice to put books in Sony when they still haven’t made inroads into Barnes & Noble or Kobo yet. Still, every little bit of marketplace helps, and I imagine negotiations with the other stores are still ongoing.

They are trying to match moods with books by having virtual flip cards with the mood you’re feeling and a book recommendation. Well, in the first place, my current mood (tired from a long drive) isn’t available, which makes me cranky. Whoops. That one’s missing too.

OK, let’s get creative. Hey, that’s there! So I’m supposed to read “The Interestings” by Meg Wolitzer. Teens at summer camp? In my current mood? Nope, I’m in the mood for an angst-free zone right now.

Sony seems to be focusing its efforts on e-books, and trying to get readers out there on board by getting them money.

Sony announced its first affiliate program through Commission Junction, according to The Digital Reader. It will pay six percent on every e-book sold through its affiliate links on websites and blogs. This seems to focus directly on author websites and book blogging sites.

It’s interesting to see Sony move in this direction. Authors promote their books on their websites and social media. Often, they send links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo – where they could also make affiliate money.

Amazon offers about the same percentage (depends on sales and amount of links from free books) while B&N also offers six percent and Kobo offers five percent.

Sony is clearly trying to become a more relevant player in the market. With B&N struggling, did Sony see a way to push its muscle around in the industry?

It doesn’t seem as though this is going to make a lot of money for affiliate users unless it’s a high-traffic website. But even then, six percent of a $12.99 book is only .78 cents.

Sony’s still making e-readers? Apparently so. The Digital Reader reports Sony’s latest, the PRS-T3, has just passed FCC validation. Details are sparse on the ground. It’s got Wi-Fi, there are two models (one of which may be touchscreen), and one report mentions Bluetooth. Nate Hoffelder figures it’s got about a 6” screen, and will probably launch in the US and Europe in August.

It’s nice they’re still out there trying new things, even if the most you can really say about them is that they can be used as evidence in anti-trust trials that there really is “competition” to Amazon (for some value of competition). Still, the Sony I tested and reviewed a few years back wasn’t a bad e-reader at the time.

]]>http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/new-sony-e-readers-pass-fcc-testing/feed/0Sony and E Ink are Making a Digital Paper Notepad and it Looks Awesome (Video)http://www.teleread.com/e-ink/sony-and-e-ink-are-making-a-digital-paper-notepad-and-it-looks-awesome-video/
http://www.teleread.com/e-ink/sony-and-e-ink-are-making-a-digital-paper-notepad-and-it-looks-awesome-video/#commentsFri, 17 May 2013 16:15:11 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=85218

I’m an all-day note-taker—my day’s or week’s itinerary, messages to give to someone else, story ideas, ramblings, etc. Unfortunately I’m also a bit of a messy … well, unorganized person, I admit. And as you may guess, those two personality traits usually add up, for me, to lots of unorganized, folded pieces of paper in my pockets or around my house and office, and also a library of notebooks of compiled thoughts and ideas with real order.

So needless to say, I’m anticipating Sony’s A4-sized (8.3-inches x 11.7-inches) digital paper slate to be rather beneficial in my life. Unveiled last week, their ongoing collaborative project using E Ink’s latest flexible Mobius technology provided a prototype that weighs only 358-grams. And at only 6.8mm thick, with a 1200×1600 pixel display, portability is key, though usability is not to be compromised.

Impressive, right? Special for the device, Sony created a high-precision thin film that can handle E Ink digital writing capabilities, omitting glass material—along with choosing a plastic bezel and casing to keep the device lightweight and very portable. It uses a stylus to write at a thickness comparable to a normal ballpoint pen. There’s no word on specs, pricing or wireless connectivity yet.

Sony has the next-generation classroom assistant targeted at school systems worldwide, perhaps with a potential to replace traditional paper notebooks altogether. Of course, not immediately. But the functionality is clearly available and that’s exciting. With technology such as this (packing a battery life of about three weeks, I should add) it seems pointless to waste real paper any longer.

It’s easy to see what my opinion about all this is—how do you think the future for E Ink notebooks is looking?

Who said high-end 10-inch Android tablets are not attractive anymore just because they’re much pricier than 7-inchers like the Nexus 7 or Amazon’s Kindle Fires? Well, a lot of people, but Sony’s Xperia Tablet Z is bound to make you rethink that.

True, the thing is not exactly the most budget-conscious around, but it’s probably worth every penny of the $500 Sony is asking for it in the U.S. Available for pre-orders already, the tablet is to start shipping on May 24, which is around the already-announced UK release date.

Five-hundred dollars will, of course, buy you the Wi-Fi-only Xperia Tablet Z with 16 GB of on-board storage, whereas if you want something with a little more wiggle room, you’ll have to cough up an extra $100 for the 32 GB model. As for the LTE version, that’s not yet up for grabs, but it should be made available at some point in the summer.

And as for the Wi-Fi variant, we should also mention that the 32 GB flavor in white comes with a bundled free charging cradle, usually worth roughly $45. How can you possibly say no to this beauty?

Today is Presidents’ Day and that’s reason for celebration not only for Dell, but also for Sony. The latter isn’t exactly as generous as the former, but we still have awesome news for folks that are in the market for a decently priced 10-inch tablet.

The Xperia Tablet S, released less than five months ago, is now just $399.99 in the 16 GB flavor. That’s $50 off the list price, but the savings don’t stop there. Sony’s store also throws in a free “casual cover” (regularly worth $59.99) with every Xperia Tablet S order, bringing the savings total to $109.99.

Not too shabby considering it’s not Christmas or Black Friday. The deal is valid through February 23, so you also have enough time to think it over. And if 16 GB of on-board storage isn’t enough to handle all your home videos and Instagram snapshots, you can also pick up the 32 GB and 64 GB Tablet S for special prices – $499.99 and $599.99 respectively, each $50 off their list prices. That George Washington sure knows how to party!

Sony unveiled the Xperia Tablet S back in late-August during IFA, and it looks like the tablet has since come available for purchase. Those interested will be able to make the purchase by way of the Sony Store, where the tablet is available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models. The tablets are priced at $399.99, $499.99 and $599.99 respectively.

Details for the Sony Reader PRS-T2 have been floating around for some time now, mostly due to an FCC filing that arrived back in early July. That bit aside though, it looks like the e-reader is just about ready for a primetime release.

So far we have yet to see anything official from Sony in terms of an availability announcement, but we have seen a pre-order product listing from the folks at J&R. The retailer has the Sony Reader PRS-T2 available for pre-order, however they have yet to offer anything in terms of an expected shipping date.

The e-reader is priced at $130 and comes with a free Harry Potter ebook pre-loaded. Otherwise, the Sony Reader PRS-T2 has features that will include a 6-inch (600 x 800) E Ink Pearl with Clear Touch Infrared Technology, 1.3GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot, a weight of 5.9 ounces and a battery life of up to 2 months. A few other perks include 6 built-in dictionaries along with support for Facebook for Reader and Evernote Clearly.

Sony recently launched its own UK e-book store with 20 pence promotions on ten e-books, which will apparently change over time—including, oddly enough, titles from Macmillan, whose American branch was so concerned about Amazon’s $9.99 e-book prices eroding the value of e-books that it implemented agency pricing and is fighting the Justice Department over its right to impose it. And since Amazon reserves the right to pricematch any sale prices on books it lists, Amazon has gone to 20 pence on those titles, too.

Perhaps the most amusing thing to me is how quickly everyone noticed Amazon was doing this discounting and jumped to the conclusion, “Oh no, Amazon’s being evil again!” It took the Bookseller investigating before the truth that it was actually instigated by Sony came out. So the moral is, Amazon’s pricematching policy and significantly greater popularity lets it take credit and get blame for its competitors’ promotions as well as its own. “Sony who?”

In case you were wondering, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling isn’t finished innovating in digital storytelling with Pottermore. At E3 yesterday, Sony announced an interactive storybook/game called “Book of Spells,” first in a series of interactive storybooks called “Wonderbook,” with all-new content written by Rowling. The game turns Sony’s PS Move motion-sensitive wand into a Hogwart’s-style magic wand, used for performing spells from a Hogwarts spellbook.

The trailer is a bit misleading, showing a kid opening a book and it animating and magically transporting him into a wizard’s castle. The video from CNet of the E3 demo is a bit more accurate—the game uses a webcam-style camera to capture an image of a placeholder book object, the Move controller, and the person playing the game, then superimposes computer-game images over them.

The gamer’s TV thus becomes a sort of technological “Mirror of Esired,” showing the user performing all these feats of magic while in the real world he’s just waving some bits of plastic around. For all of that, it really would have seemed like magic (in the Clarkian sense) just a few short years ago—and is still pretty darned impressive now.

When you think about it, it’s really a quite natural fit for imitating a Harry Potter spellbook, and a really good choice to lead off a line of interactive virtual pop-up books. The tomes in the Harry Potter novels were magically “interactive,” with moving photographs and other magical effects. The Harry Potter fan in me would find this practically irresistible.

I also find it interesting that this seems touted as more of an interactive book you experience than a game you try to “win”. It’s a way to explore the history of some of the spells used in the Harry Potter books, and to learn more about the universe—an interactive version of the sorts of supplemental guides and reference books that have always been attractive to publish alongside books of any popular series. I wonder if we’ll see more interactive tie-ins like this?

French book news site ActuaLitté reports (in French) that Sony’s PRS T1 149-Euro touchscreen e-reader has sold over 500,000 units in Europe—reportedly not far behind the sales of Amazon’s Kindle.

It’s a little tricky to make sense of the Google-translated text, but ActuaLitté seems to report that the Sony’s biggest problem is the lack of a library integrated into the device. The existing store is slow, but Sony says it is seeking a partner who can meet Sony’s performance demands. Meanwhile, competitor Kobo is invading Europe, and a possible Barnes & Noble European expansion could be on the horizon.

Although Sony has languished in the competition, it is a partner with Pottermore, and is offered in a special bundle with the Potter e-books. And it is reportedly one of the favorite e-readers in European digital library experiments. So while Sony may be largely ignored on the American side of the pond, it might have a better chance of survival in Europe, at least for a while.

]]>http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/sony-e-reader-sells-500000-units-in-europe/feed/1Used games killing game industry, game developer claims; what about used books?http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/used-games-killing-game-industry-game-developer-claims-what-about-used-books/
http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/used-games-killing-game-industry-game-developer-claims-what-about-used-books/#commentsThu, 29 Mar 2012 03:39:18 +0000http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/used-games-killing-game-industry-game-developer-claims-what-about-used-books/

Here’s another story of a developer railing against used video games. Although it may not seem to have relevance to e-books at first, I think this story demonstrates the way the gaming industry and the publishing industry are struggling with some similar issues in the digital age.

In an interview with GamesIndustry International, Silicon Knights head Denis Dyack states that used games are clobbering the game industry, cutting off the “tail” of sales that used to support game studios well after games’ original release. Without that “tail”, Dyack says, game companies can expect to receive almost all their sales in the first few months of the game’s release, and then they have to come up with other measures to try to bring money in. (Found via CNet.)

"I would argue, and I’ve said this before, that used games are cannibalizing the industry. If developers and publishers don’t see revenue from that, it’s not a matter of hey ‘we’re trying to increase the price of games to consumers, and we want more,’ we’re just trying to survive as an industry. If used games continue the way that they are, it’s going to cannibalize, there’s not going to be an industry," he said. "People won’t make those kinds of games. So I think that’s inflated the price of games, and I think that prices would have come down if there was a longer tail, but there isn’t."

On the other hand, GameStop’s CEO holds that a vibrant used game market drives a new market, generating $1.2 billion of trade credits around the world.

Now, I’m pretty sure that used video game sales have been around in one form or another for at least 30 years. People got tired of Nintendo games or even early PC games just as easily as they get tired of Playstation games today. And by the same token, second-hand bookstores have been around for at least as long as first-hand bookstores have. Why is it that over the last few years both of these used markets have suddenly become the Great Satan, threatening to drive game and book publishers to the brink of extinction?